FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE has been released

FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE is now available for the alpha, amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. It can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network; the required files can be downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will generally contain the more common ones, such as i386 and amd64.

MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO images are included at the bottom of this message.

The contents of the ISO images provided as part of the release have changed for most of the architectures. Using the i386 architecture as an example, there are ISO images named "bootonly", "disc1", "disc2", "disc3", and "docs". The "bootonly" image is suitable for booting a machine to perform a network-based installation using FTP or NFS. The "disc1", "disc2", and "disc3" images are used for a full installation that includes a basic set of packages and does not require network access to an FTP or NFS server during the installation. In addition, "disc1" supports booting into a "live CD-based filesystem" and system rescue mode. The "docs" image contains all the documentation for all supported languages. Most people will find that "disc1", "disc2", and "disc3" are all that are needed. If you intend to install ports from source instead of using the pre-built packages included with the release, only "disc1" is needed.